Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Pop Backstory Chapter 1: Broadside Ballads and the Birth of American Music

Instant classic of its age...

Some controversy surrounds the question of the first
American to “produce a Musical Composition.” A guy named Frances Hopkinson
staked claim to the honor, but, upon a little digging, a music historian of
some import named Oscar G. Sonneck identified a second candidate, named
James Lyon. Sonneck went with Hopkinson in the end (composition titled “My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free”), but still others noted the year of composition
(1759) and argued that Americans can’t predate America (touche) and that brings
in another work by Hopkinson (“Seven Songs for the Harpsichord or Forte Piano”), written 1788, as the first “American” work, so the credit still
attaches, if for a different song.

Few Americans had access to classical music back then; Thomas
Jefferson often lamented how damn hard it was to scare up a band in the wilds
of Virginia, and he was a big fan of music (“the favorite passion of [his]
soul”). Amateur enthusiasts made do, playing mostly in the
home and with whomever came to hand; scaling up was hard and musical education,
while possible, not only cost money, but required the correct address. Even
then, the songs came from the Old Country, not the States, and (as noted above)
original composition took a century and two-thirds (or thereabouts) to happen,
and it was never an object of mass popularity.

It was another borrowed form that seems closest to the first
truly “popular music” to take hold on these shores. These went by the name of
“broadside ballads,” and were little more than tales of adventure (and
sometimes bastardry) set to familiar songs that already existed. Different
poems often borrowed the same tune, too: for instance, both “The Children in the Woods” and “Chevy Chase” (not a typo) could play over the tune of "Ponder Well," from a production called The Beggar’s Opera. (That's the whole thing, btw; buckle up.) (Also, The Beggar’s Opera actually
comes up a lot, see “Our Polly Is a Sad Slut,” which played under “The Lawyer’s Pedigree”). The themes vary quite a bit – e.g., “Chevy Chase” records a fateful
day of battle (not to mention the aching stupidity of fighting over an
intangible like “honor”), while “The Children in the Woods” tells the sad tale
of young children getting victimized by a treacherous relative. (Another
classic, and a charmer, “The Spanish Lady” also shows up in Richard Crawford’s book).

“Broadside ballads” owe their name to how these poems
circulated – e.g. via “broadsides,” aka, over-sized pamphlets (near as I can tell). Americans made a
few of their own, “The Rebels Reward” being the one dissected in Crawford’s
work (can't find a clean link to the poem, but here's the alleged tune). They turned these around pretty damn quickly, too: “The Rebels Reward”
appeared just two weeks after the incident that inspired it (something called
the Battle of Norridgewock; also, not a high point in military history). I
don’t recall Crawford’s book going into any detail as to where these things got
performed, but I’d assume it’s anywhere people gathered. He does, however, make
clear that the sheets spread far and wide enough that anyone who wanted to know
the words could.

The closer events got to the American Revolution, the more
topical (that is to say, political) the ballad’s themes became. These were
native works in that respect, covering, in Crawford’s words:

“…the settlement of the North American colonies, Indian
wars, dissatisfaction with English rule, crime, love, and religion.”

For all that, it sounds like the music was first borrowed,
then recycled. The beginnings of truly unique musical forms that are
specifically native to the United States grew up within our nation’s infamous
“peculiar institution.” Yep, slavery. And so, once again, it’s impossible to
talk about American popular music without heavy reference to African Americans.

Crawford’s titled his chapter on the black experience in
Colonial America, “Maintaining Oral Traditions: African Music in Early
America,” and that seems appropriate. Much as white Americans borrowed from
Europe, so African Americans borrowed from Africa. He characterizes this
African tradition a number of ways, while noting commonalities like the use of
“call and response,” the tradition of combining music and dance (go figure), the
idea that “African musicians tend to approach singing as well as instrumental
playing in a percussive manner,” the use of some instruments original to
Africa, drums in particular, etc.

To read between the lines of Crawford’s work a little
(actually, no; he was explicit; see the end), the thing that probably enabled
the development of an original American music came when African American
communities started using European instruments into their public gatherings. More
than a few slaves were trained in how to play European instruments – some
extensively – and that led to the kinds of things white witnesses put in the
historical record, events like election day festivities in Newport, Rhode
Island. Here’s most of Crawford’s paragraph on that:

“…singing was accompanied by fiddle, tambourine, banjo, and
drum, a combination poorly suited to blending. Yet African musicians are said
to prefer a piling up of different-sounding lines to a blending of lines into
one homogenous sound. The Newport example, with ‘every voice in its highest
key’ singing a babel of African languages mixed with English and accompanied by
instruments, also illustrates a third African trait: the tendency to pack a
series of musical events as densely as possible into a relatively short time,
thus filling all available musical space.”

Crawford discusses a handful of regional peculiarities, but
his passage on Louisiana taps into what happens when all a variety of
influences come together with a little less friction – i.e., what’s latent and
potential becomes actual. He notes, especially, the presence of free blacks and
the related openness of the musical culture in particular (in his words,
“mixing freely, even intimately, with Europeans, Indians, and mestizos”), as
allowing the kind of intermingling that accelerates cultural transmission.
Local laws afforded African Americans to opportunity to hold thinly-regulated,
big-ass outdoor festivals, even back then, and I imagine that inspired some
enthusiasm, and therefore inspiration to take hold.

Crawford ends the chapter on black influence on revival
meetings during the First and Second Great Awakenings (1730s-1740s, and
1780s-1830, respectively). Here, I’ll finally touch on a theme that Crawford
notes throughout this chapter, one that I’ve avoided so far (in service of
flow) – e.g. the reality that large gatherings of black people doing black things
freaked out a lot of white people. In the section on the revival meetings,
Crawford uses a stodgy Methodist named John F. Watson as a sort of voice for
this discomfort. In fairness to Watson, he hated all versions of informality.
In his mind, the expression of the sacred should come only from the pen of “a
first-rate poet, such as can only occur in every ten or twenty million of men.”
So, yeah, real hardass.

From that vantage, small wonder that Watson clocked “black
influence” on revival meetings with horror. In reality, what that influence
really did was make the revivals more fun, looser and more emotive. Rather than
lug around great hymnals and droning out some classics, African American events
(actually, these were often segregated events within larger revivals) adopted
simpler forms in order to keep the focus on getting people excited. Crawford
invented the following chorus to illustrate the point:

“Go shouting, go shouting.

Go shouting, go shouting.

Go shouting, go shouting.

Go shouting all your days.”

In the next verses, the prayer leader might switch up the
verb, e.g., use “singing,” “praying” or even “rejoicing” (that’s Crawford’s
phrasing, btw) to switch things up a little, all while keeping the song going.
The goal wasn’t to get people thinking about faith, but to have them experience
it, to meet it with in some loosely decorous space of ecstacy.

That theme of discomfort, even rejection, forms a common
response throughout the chapter. No matter where they encountered it –
Connecticut, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Virginia, New Orleans – there was
always the reaction that the music was too wild, the accompanying dancing
(which was always, always there) indecent, and a mild, but noted sense of
indecency lurked in all of it. In between the critiques, though, you’ll read
anecdotes of white people connecting to popular forms (e.g. an all-night
fiddle/dance party in 1690 in the home of Reverend Thomas Teakle, that featured
a black fiddler, and that was organized by friends of the right Reverend’s
daughter). Fun is fun, people. The smart ones get that.

Crawford ends this chapter with one sentence that summarizes
the various processes above, even if it’s specific to the revivals. I’ll close
with that:

“The story of the camp-meeting spiritual reflects two
complimentary processes from which much of the distinctive quality of American
music has flowed: blacks infusing Euro-American practices with African
influence, and whites drawing on black adaptations to vitalize their own traditions
of music making.”